Great 'Hello' Mystery Is Solved

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: March 5, 1992

The word "hello," it appears, came straight from the fertile brain of the wizard of Menlo Park, N.J., who concocted the sonorous syllables to resolve one of the first crises of techno-etiquette: What do you say to start a telephone conversation?

Two contemporaries of Edison credited him with the word, but too vaguely for Allen Koenigsberg, a classics professor at Brooklyn College who has a passion for early phonographs and their history. Resolved to sort out the "hello" mystery, Mr. Koenigsberg embarked on a tortuous search five years ago that led him, finally and triumphantly, to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company Archives in lower Manhattan, where he found an unpublished letter by Edison. Dated Aug. 15, 1877, it is addressed to one T.B.A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh. Mr. David was preparing to introduce the telephone to that city.

At the time, Edison envisioned the telephone as a business device only, with a permanently open line to parties at either end. This setup raised a problem: How would anyone know that the other party wanted to speak? Edison addressed the issue as follows: Friend David, I don't think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think? EDISON

It was a word of destiny. Over at the laboratories of Edison's rival, Bell was insisting on "Ahoy!" as the correct way to answer the telephone. It was trounced by "hello," which became the standard as the first telephone exchanges, equipped by Edison, were set up across the United States and operating manuals adopted the word. The first public exchange, opened in New Haven on Jan. 28, 1878, wavered between "hello" and the fusty "What is wanted?" in its manual. By 1880, "hello" had won out.

Like the telephone, the punchy "hello" was a liberator and a social leveler. "The phone overnight cut right through the 19th-century etiquette that you don't speak to anyone unless you've been introduced," Mr. Koenigsberg said. And "hello" was the edge of the blade. "If you think about it," he said, "why didn't Stanley say hello to Livingston? The word didn't exist." Neither did the simple and elegant "dude," so Stanley was thrown back on the formal "Dr. Livingston, I presume."

Mr. Koenigsberg became fascinated by the "hello" puzzle after reading a passage in Francis Jehl's "Menlo Park Reminiscences" (Edison Institute, 1937), in which the author, a former Edison employee, recalled the scene at Menlo Park in 1878:

"The shouting and hullabaloo inside the laboratory can only be imagined," he wrote. "Being hard of hearing, Edison went about his work unperturbed, while the rest of us were nearly deafened as 'Hello-hello-hello' re-echoed from corner to corner."

If Mr. Jehl (pronounced Yale) is to be believed, then hello was being used well before the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1883.

Mr. Jehl wrote that Edison was first credited with inventing the word by Frederick Perry Fish, a president of A.T.&T., who said in 1907 that Edison came up with hello as a more efficient alternative to "Are you there?" or "Are you ready to talk?"

"Well, Mr. Edison did away with that un-American way of doing things," Mr. Jehl quoted Mr. Fish as saying. "He caught up a receiver one day and yelled into the transmitter one word -- a most satisfactory, capable, soul-satisfying word -- 'Hello.' It has gone clear around the world."

Mr. Koenigsberg, who teaches a course in the history of English, was rightly suspicious of that "one day." He wanted dates and documents to establish a connection between the word, the telephone and Edison.

At A.T.&T., with the help of Alan Gardner, the company's archivist, he picked up the paper trail. First, he made note that the early telephone operators were called "hello girls," a term that appears in Mark Twain's "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889).

Mr. Koenigsberg recently came upon an earlier use of the word by Twain. In "A Telephonic Conversation," a comic sketch written in 1880, Twain reproduced half of an imaginary telephone conversation, with "hello" making an appearance. It represents the first known use of the word in a work of literature.

In an old file, Mr. Koenigsberg discovered the next links in the chain: unpublished letters from 1885 between Edison and Chauncy Smith, a lawyer for Bell. Mr. Smith had asked Edison to provide him with a "brass wheel" that would automatically play the recorded word "hello" to signal that a telephone connection had been made. "I wish to get your instrument for experiment," he wrote.

Edison told him to get lost. No more was heard of this early answering machine, but it does suggest that "hello" was the standard telephone greeting, even for Bell partisans.

Mr. Koenigsberg next looked through the minutes from the first National Convention of Telephone Companies, held in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in September 1880. There he found the following words in an address from the organization's president: "The shortest speech that I could make to you and that would express a great deal to you, probably would be the one that is on all your badges -- 'Hello'!"

The delegates burst into applause. The Hello! name tag went on to become a national institution.

Finally, Mr. Koenigsberg found the historic letter of August 1877. In December 1987, justifiably excited, he published his findings in the journal he publishes, The Antique Phonograph Monthly. No one cared.

Mr. Koenigsberg occasionally delivers cultural treats of this sort to his 2,000 mechanically obsessed subscribers, but, he said, "I think they find it irritating because it takes space away from patent numbers and things like that."

His research enters the area of educated guesswork when it comes to settling the question of why Edison used "hello" in the first place.

When Edison discovered the principle of recorded sound on July 18, 1877, he shouted "Halloo!" into the mouthpiece of the strip phonograph. The word was the traditional call to incite hounds to the chase, and is a close relative of such words as hilla, hillo, halloa and hallo, all used to hail from a distance.

The British "hullo," which dates from the mid-19th century, is deceptive. It was used not as a greeting but as an expression of surprise, as in "Hullo, what have we here?"

It seems likely that Edison, satisfied with the resonant halloo, continued to use it in his experiments, at some point compressing the pronunciation and modifying the spelling, never his strong suit, in any case.

Mr. Koenigsberg said he would still like to know what exactly was going through Edison's mind at the moment of creation. For satisfaction, he will have to turn to one of the first songs to use the Edisonian greeting, "Hello, Central. Give Me Heaven."